A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of
communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance
to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French
Radicals and German police-spies.

Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as communistic
by its opponents in power? Where is the opposition that has not hurled
back the branding reproach of communism, against the more advanced opposition
parties, as well as against its reactionary adversaries?

Two things result from this fact:

I. Communism is already acknowledged by all European powers to be itself
a power.

II. It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face
of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies,
and meet this nursery tale of the Spectre of Communism with a manifesto
of the party itself.

To this end, Communists of various nationalities have assembled in London
and sketched the following manifesto, to be published in the English, French,
German, Italian, Flemish and Danish languages.

The history of all hitherto existing society(2) is the history of class struggles.

Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord
and serf, guild-master(3) and
journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition
to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight,
a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution
of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.

In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated
arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold gradation of social
rank. In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves; in
the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices,
serfs; in almost all of these classes, again, subordinate gradations.

The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal
society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established
new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place
of the old ones.

Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct
feature: it has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more
and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes
directly facing each other — Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.

From the serfs of the Middle Ages sprang the chartered burghers of
the earliest towns. From these burgesses the first elements of the bourgeoisie
were developed.

The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh
ground for the rising bourgeoisie. The East-Indian and Chinese markets,
the colonisation of America, trade with the colonies, the increase in the
means of exchange and in commodities generally, gave to commerce, to navigation,
to industry, an impulse never before known, and thereby, to the revolutionary
element in the tottering feudal society, a rapid development.

The feudal system of industry, in which industrial production was monopolised
by closed guilds, now no longer sufficed for the growing wants of the new
markets. The manufacturing system took its place. The guild-masters were
pushed on one side by the manufacturing middle class; division of labour between
the different corporate guilds vanished in the face of division of labour
in each single workshop.

Meantime the markets kept ever growing, the demand ever rising. Even
manufacturer no longer sufficed. Thereupon, steam and machinery revolutionised
industrial production. The place of manufacture was taken by the giant,
Modern Industry; the place of the industrial middle class by industrial
millionaires, the leaders of the whole industrial armies, the modern bourgeois.

Modern industry has established the world market, for which the discovery
of America paved the way. This market has given an immense development
to commerce, to navigation, to communication by land. This development
has, in its turn, reacted on the extension of industry; and in proportion as
industry, commerce, navigation, railways extended, in the same proportion
the bourgeoisie developed, increased its capital, and pushed into the background
every class handed down from the Middle Ages.

We see, therefore, how the modern bourgeoisie is itself the product
of a long course of development, of a series of revolutions in the modes
of production and of exchange.

Each step in the development of the bourgeoisie
was accompanied by a corresponding political advance of that class. An
oppressed class under the sway of the feudal nobility, an armed and self-governing
association in the medieval commune(4):
here independent urban republic (as in Italy and Germany); there taxable
“third estate” of the monarchy (as in France); afterwards, in the period
of manufacturing proper, serving either the semi-feudal or the absolute
monarchy as a counterpoise against the nobility, and, in fact, cornerstone
of the great monarchies in general, the bourgeoisie has at last, since
the establishment of Modern Industry and of the world market, conquered
for itself, in the modern representative State, exclusive political sway.
The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common
affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.

The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part.

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end
to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder
the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors”, and has
left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than
callous “cash payment”. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies
of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism,
in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth
into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered
freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade.
In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions,
it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.

The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured
and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the
lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers.

The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental
veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.

The bourgeoisie has disclosed how it came to pass that the brutal
display of vigour in the Middle Ages, which reactionaries so much admire,
found its fitting complement in the most slothful indolence. It has been
the first to show what man’s activity can bring about. It has accomplished
wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals;
it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former Exoduses
of nations and crusades.

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising
the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production,
and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes
of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition
of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising
of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting
uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier
ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and
venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones
become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into
air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face
with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases
the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere,
settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere.

The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market
given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country.
To the great chagrin of Reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet
of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established
national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They
are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and
death question for all civilised nations, by industries that no longer
work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest
zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in
every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the
production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction
the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and
national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction,
universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual
production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common
property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and
more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures,
there arises a world literature.

The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production,
by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the
most barbarian, nations into civilisation. The cheap prices of commodities
are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with
which it forces the barbarians’ intensely
obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on
pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels
them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to
become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its
own image.

The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns.
It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population
as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of
the population from the idiocy of rural life. Just as it has made the country
dependent on the towns, so it has made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries
dependent on the civilised ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois,
the East on the West.

The bourgeoisie keeps more and more doing away with the scattered state
of the population, of the means of production, and of property. It has
agglomerated population, centralised the means of production, and has concentrated
property in a few hands. The necessary consequence of this was political
centralisation. Independent, or but loosely connected provinces, with separate
interests, laws, governments, and systems of taxation, became lumped together
into one nation, with one government, one code of laws, one national
class-interest, one frontier, and one customs-tariff.

The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years,
has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have
all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature’s forces to man,
machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture,
steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents
for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out
of the ground — what earlier century had even a presentiment that such
productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?

We see then: the means of production and of exchange, on whose
foundation the bourgeoisie built itself up, were generated in feudal society.
At a certain stage in the development of these means of production and
of exchange, the conditions under which feudal society produced and exchanged,
the feudal organisation of agriculture and manufacturing industry, in one
word, the feudal relations of property became no longer compatible with
the already developed productive forces; they became so many fetters. They
had to be burst asunder; they were burst asunder.

Into their place stepped free competition, accompanied by a social and
political constitution adapted in it, and the economic and political sway
of the bourgeois class.

A similar movement is going on before our own eyes. Modern bourgeois
society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property,
a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of
exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers
of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells. For many a decade
past the history of industry and commerce is but the history of the revolt
of modern productive forces against modern conditions of production, against
the property relations that are the conditions for the existence of the
bourgeois and of its rule. It is enough to mention the commercial crises
that by their periodical return put the existence of the entire bourgeois
society on its trial, each time more threateningly. In these crises, a
great part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously
created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises,
there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed
an absurdity — the epidemic of over-production. Society suddenly finds
itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a
famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply of every
means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why?
Because there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence,
too much industry, too much commerce. The productive forces at the disposal
of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions
of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for
these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome
these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society,
endanger the existence of bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois
society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them. And how
does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand by enforced
destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest
of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones.
That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive
crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented.

The weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the
ground are now turned against the bourgeoisie itself.

But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring
death to itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield
those weapons — the modern working class — the proletarians.

In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed,
in the same proportion is the proletariat, the modern working class, developed
— a class of labourers, who live only so long as they find work, and who
find work only so long as their labour increases capital. These labourers,
who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity, like every other article
of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition,
to all the fluctuations of the market.

Owing to the extensive use of machinery, and to the division of
labour, the work of the proletarians has lost all individual character,
and, consequently, all charm for the workman. He becomes an appendage of
the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most
easily acquired knack, that is required of him. Hence, the cost of production
of a workman is restricted, almost entirely, to the means of subsistence
that he requires for maintenance, and for the propagation of his race.
But the price of a commodity, and therefore also of labour, is equal to
its cost of production. In proportion, therefore, as the repulsiveness
of the work increases, the wage decreases. Nay more, in proportion
as the use of machinery and division of labour increases, in the same proportion
the burden of toil also increases, whether by prolongation of the working
hours, by the increase of the work exacted in a given time or by increased
speed of machinery, etc.

Modern Industry has converted the little workshop of the patriarchal
master into the great factory of the industrial capitalist. Masses of labourers,
crowded into the factory, are organised like soldiers. As privates of the
industrial army they are placed under the command of a perfect hierarchy
of officers and sergeants. Not only are they slaves of the bourgeois class,
and of the bourgeois State; they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine,
by the overlooker, and, above all, by the individual bourgeois manufacturer
himself. The more openly this despotism proclaims gain to be its end and
aim, the more petty, the more hateful and the more embittering it is.

The less the skill and exertion of strength implied in manual
labour, in other words, the more modern industry becomes developed, the
more is the labour of men superseded by that of women. Differences of age
and sex have no longer any distinctive social validity for the working
class. All are instruments of labour, more or less expensive to use, according
to their age and sex.

No sooner is the exploitation of the labourer by the manufacturer,
so far, at an end, that he receives his wages in cash, than he is set upon
by the other portions of the bourgeoisie, the landlord, the shopkeeper,
the pawnbroker, etc.

The lower strata of the middle class — the small tradespeople,
shopkeepers, and retired tradesmen generally, the handicraftsmen and peasants
— all these sink gradually into the proletariat, partly because their
diminutive capital does not suffice for the scale on which Modern Industry
is carried on, and is swamped in the competition with the large capitalists,
partly because their specialised skill is rendered worthless by new methods
of production. Thus the proletariat is recruited from all classes of the
population.

The proletariat goes through various stages of development. With
its birth begins its struggle with the bourgeoisie. At first the contest
is carried on by individual labourers, then by the workpeople of a factory,
then by the operative of one trade, in one locality, against the individual
bourgeois who directly exploits them. They direct their attacks not against
the bourgeois conditions of production, but against the instruments of production
themselves; they destroy imported wares that compete with their labour,
they smash to pieces machinery, they set factories ablaze, they seek to
restore by force the vanished status of the workman of the Middle Ages.

At this stage, the labourers still form an incoherent mass scattered
over the whole country, and broken up by their mutual competition. If anywhere
they unite to form more compact bodies, this is not yet the consequence
of their own active union, but of the union of the bourgeoisie, which class,
in order to attain its own political ends, is compelled to set the whole
proletariat in motion, and is moreover yet, for a time, able to do so.
At this stage, therefore, the proletarians do not fight their enemies,
but the enemies of their enemies, the remnants of absolute monarchy, the
landowners, the non-industrial bourgeois, the petty bourgeois. Thus, the
whole historical movement is concentrated in the hands of the bourgeoisie;
every victory so obtained is a victory for the bourgeoisie.

But with the development of industry, the proletariat not only increases
in number; it becomes concentrated in greater masses, its strength grows,
and it feels that strength more. The various interests and conditions of
life within the ranks of the proletariat are more and more equalised, in
proportion as machinery obliterates all distinctions of labour, and nearly
everywhere reduces wages to the same low level. The growing competition
among the bourgeois, and the resulting commercial crises, make the wages
of the workers ever more fluctuating. The increasing improvement of machinery,
ever more rapidly developing, makes their livelihood more and more precarious;
the collisions between individual workmen and individual bourgeois take
more and more the character of collisions between two classes. Thereupon,
the workers begin to form combinations (Trades’ Unions) against the bourgeois;
they club together in order to keep up the rate of wages; they found permanent
associations in order to make provision beforehand for these occasional
revolts. Here and there, the contest breaks out into riots.

Now and then the workers are victorious, but only for a time.
The real fruit of their battles lies, not in the immediate result, but in
the ever expanding union of the workers. This union is helped on by the
improved means of communication that are created by modern industry, and
that place the workers of different localities in contact with one another.
It was just this contact that was needed to centralise the numerous local
struggles, all of the same character, into one national struggle between
classes. But every class struggle is a political struggle. And that union,
to attain which the burghers of the Middle Ages, with their miserable highways,
required centuries, the modern proletarian, thanks to railways, achieve
in a few years.

This organisation of the proletarians into a class, and, consequently
into a political party, is continually being upset again by the competition
between the workers themselves. But it ever rises up again, stronger, firmer,
mightier. It compels legislative recognition of particular interests of
the workers, by taking advantage of the divisions among the bourgeoisie
itself. Thus, the ten-hours’ bill in England was carried.

Altogether collisions between the classes of the old society further,
in many ways, the course of development of the proletariat. The bourgeoisie
finds itself involved in a constant battle. At first with the aristocracy;
later on, with those portions of the bourgeoisie itself, whose interests
have become antagonistic to the progress of industry; at all time with
the bourgeoisie of foreign countries. In all these battles, it sees itself
compelled to appeal to the proletariat, to ask for help, and thus, to drag
it into the political arena. The bourgeoisie itself, therefore, supplies
the proletariat with its own elements of political and general education,
in other words, it furnishes the proletariat with weapons for fighting
the bourgeoisie.

Further, as we have already seen, entire sections of the ruling class
are, by the advance of industry, precipitated into the proletariat, or
are at least threatened in their conditions of existence. These also supply
the proletariat with fresh elements of enlightenment and progress.

Finally, in times when the class struggle nears the decisive hour, the
progress of dissolution going on within the ruling class, in fact within
the whole range of old society, assumes such a violent, glaring character,
that a small section of the ruling class cuts itself adrift, and joins
the revolutionary class, the class that holds the future in its hands.
Just as, therefore, at an earlier period, a section of the nobility went
over to the bourgeoisie, so now a portion of the bourgeoisie goes over
to the proletariat, and in particular, a portion of the bourgeois ideologists,
who have raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically
the historical movement as a whole.

Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today,
the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class. The other classes
decay and finally disappear in the face of Modern Industry; the proletariat
is its special and essential product.

The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the
artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie, to save
from extinction their existence as fractions of the middle class. They
are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative. Nay more, they are
reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history. If by chance,
they are revolutionary, they are only so in view of their impending transfer
into the proletariat; they thus defend not their present, but their future
interests, they desert their own standpoint to place themselves at that
of the proletariat.

The “dangerous class”, [lumpenproletariat]
the social scum, that passively rotting mass
thrown off by the lowest layers of the old society, may, here and there,
be swept into the movement by a proletarian revolution; its conditions
of life, however, prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of
reactionary intrigue.

In the condition of the proletariat, those of old society at large are
already virtually swamped. The proletarian is without property; his relation
to his wife and children has no longer anything in common with the bourgeois
family relations; modern industry labour, modern subjection to capital,
the same in England as in France, in America as in Germany, has stripped
him of every trace of national character. Law, morality, religion, are
to him so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as
many bourgeois interests.

All the preceding classes that got the upper hand sought to fortify
their already acquired status by subjecting society at large to their conditions
of appropriation. The proletarians cannot become masters of the productive
forces of society, except by abolishing their own previous mode of appropriation,
and thereby also every other previous mode of appropriation. They have
nothing of their own to secure and to fortify; their mission is to destroy
all previous securities for, and insurances of, individual property.

All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in
the interest of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious,
independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense
majority. The proletariat, the lowest stratum of our present society, cannot
stir, cannot raise itself up, without the whole superincumbent strata of
official society being sprung into the air.

Though not in substance, yet in form, the struggle of the proletariat
with the bourgeoisie is at first a national struggle. The proletariat of
each country must, of course, first of all settle matters with its own
bourgeoisie.

In depicting the most general phases of the development of the proletariat,
we traced the more or less veiled civil war, raging within existing society,
up to the point where that war breaks out into open revolution, and where
the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie lays the foundation for the sway
of the proletariat.

Hitherto, every form of society has been based, as we have already seen,
on the antagonism of oppressing and oppressed classes. But in order to
oppress a class, certain conditions must be assured to it under which it
can, at least, continue its slavish existence. The serf, in the period
of serfdom, raised himself to membership in the commune, just as the petty
bourgeois, under the yoke of the feudal absolutism, managed to develop
into a bourgeois. The modern labourer, on the contrary, instead of rising
with the process of industry, sinks deeper and deeper below the conditions
of existence of his own class. He becomes a pauper, and pauperism develops
more rapidly than population and wealth. And here it becomes evident, that
the bourgeoisie is unfit any longer to be the ruling class in society,
and to impose its conditions of existence upon society as an over-riding
law. It is unfit to rule because it is incompetent to assure an existence
to its slave within his slavery, because it cannot help letting him sink
into such a state, that it has to feed him, instead of being fed by him.
Society can no longer live under this bourgeoisie, in other words, its
existence is no longer compatible with society.

The essential conditions for the existence and for the sway of the bourgeois
class is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital
is wage-labour. Wage-labour rests exclusively on competition between the
labourers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie,
replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by the revolutionary
combination, due to association. The development of Modern Industry, therefore,
cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces
and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above
all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat
are equally inevitable.

By proletariat, the class of modern wage labourers who, having
no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labour
power in order to live. [Engels, 1888 English edition]

2.
That is, all written history. In 1847, the pre-history of society,
the social organisation existing previous to recorded history, all but
unknown. Since then, August von Haxthausen (1792-1866) discovered common
ownership of land in Russia, Georg Ludwig von Maurer proved it to be the
social foundation from which all Teutonic races started in history, and,
by and by, village communities were found to be, or to have been, the primitive
form of society everywhere from India to Ireland. The inner organisation
of this primitive communistic society was laid bare, in its typical form,
by Lewis Henry Morgan's (1818-1881) crowning discovery of the true nature
of the gens and its relation to the tribe. With the dissolution of the
primeval communities, society begins to be differentiated into separate
and finally antagonistic classes. I have attempted to retrace this dissolution
in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State,
second edition, Stuttgart, 1886. [Engels, 1888 English Edition and 1890 German Edition (with the last sentence omitted)]

3.
Guild-master, that is, a full member of a guild, a master within, not a
head of a guild. [Engels, 1888 English Edition]

4.
This was the name given their urban communities by the townsmen of Italy
and France, after they had purchased or conquered their initial rights
of self-government from their feudal lords. [Engels, 1890 German edition]

“Commune” was the name taken in France by the nascent towns even
before they had conquered from their feudal lords and masters local self-government
and political rights as the “Third Estate.” Generally speaking, for the
economical development of the bourgeoisie, England is here taken as the
typical country, for its political development, France. [Engels, 1888 English Edition]